Quick game of Imperial Settlers. It’s officially passed 51st State / New Era as my top game now.

I can now see that the faction mechanic goes a long ways to making the game interesting, it adds much more difference in between play styles compared to the old ones which were pretty equivalent by turn 3.

The clean up of the “3 points maximum per card rule”, the clean up of the weird “blue forces / red forces / white forces” arrows, less confusing iconography, all those make the game much more playable too.

Imperial Settlers. I need more Features.

We also tried one of Joe’s Kickstarter games: The Agents.

The Agents, wide shot

The Agents, a single faction

Really confusing little thing, with a lot of high tension indecision: every agent card you play gives points and powers, but you have to give one to your opponent as you play it.

Lots of complex combos are possible, though the scoring is a bit difficult. It’s surprisingly difficult of a game on multiple levels.

The Jol-Nar player (purple) managed to politics himself into a sweet situation of no one attacking him, and being Jol-Nar, leveraged that into a unstoppable technical advantage. The fact that everyone else got stuck fighting each other meant that he squeaked to a win Turn 6.

There’s an asterisk or two on the game as we didn’t play the rules right 100%, in particular we allowed ships to be built in a dock on the same turn that docks are built, but we did pretty close all considered.

I ‘get’ Mephisto, much more than I ‘got’ Dancer, but it’s a very hard army to use, and very reliant on good draw order. Similar in concept to a cross between Neo-Jungle and Dancer, except without the rampant power growth of the former, and the very high mobility of the latter.

Steve’s for Arkham Horror. Not much to say other than no matter how many playthroughs I do of it, keeping track of the rules never seems to get any easier.

Arkham Horror, Lurker at the Threshold expansion

Visible in screenshot, some of Steve’s extras like the blessing dice, tentacle gate holders, and fancy elder signs for seals.

I grabbed the phone app with the hopes that it would help us keep track of monster limits and gates, but no such luck: all it does is show you a picture of the game map, sorta keep track of inventory and encounter draws, and act as a dice roller (that doesn’t even count successes for you). Super weak.

Did Portal’s Imperial Settlers again, and managed to hit 60 points as Romans. The secret was a giant amount of Feature cards with points for building same color, and using the Roman 3-building-colors cards to trigger all of them.

Very rewarding game. Very clearly simpler rules than 51st State, but I do miss the incredibly complex combos of the original.

We got new bookshelves at home and while reärranging books found the Drupal card game. I got it as booth swag at a conference and thought it was a branded deck of cards when it was actually a full blind-bidding game

Drupal Card Game, near start

Good if simple game, and also hands down the best booth freebie I ever got. The idea is to try and complete the modules on the board by blind bidding cards on them, and use then use the completed ones to score cards you kept in your hand.

Runs in about 30 mins so good for lunch play, specially since we run like 6 Drupal sites at work atm.